


From this Day Forward (the Wedding Bell Blues remix)

by Lady_Ganesh



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Developing Relationship, Humor, M/M, Marriage Proposal, unconventional proposals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26197636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh
Summary: Schuldig won't say he's in love.
Relationships: Brad Crawford/Schuldig, background Nagi/Mamoru
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: Remix Revival 2020





	From this Day Forward (the Wedding Bell Blues remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Daegaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [With All My Worldly Goods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/217741) by [Daegaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer). 



On his thirteenth birthday, the voices started bleeding in. They'd always been there, as long as he could remember, but now they were louder, loud enough that sometimes it was hard to tell where he ended and the voices began.

His cousin was getting married in a month, and his sister talked about it endlessly, about what it would be like when _she_ would be married, the white dress, the candles in the cathedral, the exact flowers she wanted in her bouquet (cornflowers, and the bridesmaids would wear blue, _like my eyes, won't that be pretty?)_.

The ceremony was all right. It was the reception-- _she drank too much when will we get to the shoe auction? why isn't the food here already I'm starving what do you mean Hans left her for another man--_ that broke him open.

Someone found him vomiting in the men's and said, _come with us. We'll make it quiet._

It took years, but they did what they said they'd do. The voices quieted. They never went away--sometimes they still bled in, bled through--but he could eat and drink and piss without wondering if it was really his body that needed to do it.

He thought he'd been eighteen when they assigned him to Crawford.

Crawford's first words to him had been, "I don't like telepaths."

Schuldig hadn't even bothered answering. They were stuck with each other, and there wasn't much either of them could do about it.

Crawford had started cold and remained there. But it didn’t feel like Crawford was holding a knife at his ribs, ready to stab him in the back. That was an exception, at the Schloss. He could work with cold.

Cold meant they worked efficiently together. It meant they didn't play any stupid games. Farfarello seemed to like Schuldig, in his lucid moments. It was enough, enough that Schuldig had started telling himself that things were fine as they were. Enough that he'd stopped thinking of getting out. Enough that he'd stopped wanting anything better.

Then the kid showed up, and they went to Japan, and it all went to hell.

It happened when he was holding ice to his head, wondering if he should ask Crawford how long he'd be seeing double. Every time he moved, it felt like he was getting hit all over again with that fucking golf club. 

Crawford had come into the room, the light behind him shockingly bright, and for a half a second, both their guards dropped. Schuldig picked up--

 _He's scared,_ Schuldig thought. _Not for himself. For me._

"You're due for more painkillers," he said.

"Please," Schuldig said, and took the pills and water Crawford offered. The water was cool, and the thought of more pain medication was more than welcome. Crawford's touch--

If there was one thing he'd learned at Rosenkreuz, it was to stop wanting. Even physical desire was weakness. Crawford had promised them freedom, and that was dangerous enough. 

Crawford looked tired, now that Schuldig had allowed himself to look. "You're fine to sleep," he said, "if you're ever comfortable enough to. I can--"

"Stay," Schuldig said. Let Crawford think what he wanted about why.

Crawford didn't speak. But he stayed.

He was coughing salt water out of his lungs when he felt Crawford approaching. That was three of them alive. "The kid?" he said, spitting what felt like a piece of dead fish out of his mouth.

"Everyone's alive," Crawford said. "Even Weiss." He laughed. He'd lost his jacket in the chaos; his shirt was clinging to him, translucent with water. Schuldig could see straight through it.

"Shit," Schuldig said. "How the fuck did we do that?"

Crawford dropped down onto the sand next to him, his trousers squishing a little. "Because we're powerful," he said. "Because we're smart. Because we're going to take everything we want."

"Everything?" Schuldig said, and he wasn't asking about what Crawford wanted, not really, but Crawford answered anyway; his mouth on Schuldig's, raw and hard and wanting, dead fish or no dead fish.

They kissed until Nagi dropped a bucket's worth of water on their heads.

At some point waking up next to Crawford started feeling normal. At some point they each had their own side of the bed. They didn't talk about whatever it was they had. What was the point? It could end the next day, the next hour.

Maybe it was that he'd already gotten more than he'd ever thought he could have. Maybe he was just greedy. But one morning in a little backwater town in Sweden--Schuldig hadn't even bothered learning the name--he looked over at Crawford, fresh out of the shower, blinking nearsightedly in the perpetual twilight of fall, and thought, _we could get married._

He'd always wanted to see New York City. Tokyo had had more than enough heads to hop in and out of, but they were relentlessly polite. He wanted to see what the rudest city in the world would get up to with just a little pushing. They could go be tourists, get a nice hotel suite, have some kind of silly flower-filled extravaganza. They could dress up Nagi, who was finally starting to look like more than an awkward little kid. Farfarello could burn down a nice big church.

It was a joke in his mind, when it started. Something that would cheer him up when things looked like they were about to go to shit. But at some point it stopped being so funny.

Crawford would say no. Schuldig _knew_ he would say no. But it didn't stop him thinking about it. 

"We're going to get attacked," Crawford announced one morning at breakfast, the same way a dad in a sitcom would announce a family road trip. 

"I knew this place was getting dull," Nagi said. "Eszett?"

Crawford nodded. That was the usual source, though every once in a while another part of their past caught up with them. They'd run into Weiss, of all people, in England, though outmaneuvering Weiss hadn't been much work. 

"Can't we just go kill them first?" Schuldig said. He'd been hoping to get some shopping done.

"If we do that," Crawford said, "they'll send more and better assets after us, sooner than we'd like. It's important to make them think we're escaping by the skin of our teeth." He poured out a second cup of coffee. "Really, it'd be best if we sacrificed a member of the team, but that's not really practical." A sip. "There are too few of us."

"Can we still go shopping?"

"They're expecting us to," Crawford said. "Though you certainly don't need another pair of tight pants."

 _You don't complain about them when you're taking them off,_ Schuldig sent to him.

"Knock it off," Nagi said, visibly uncomfortable. 

His empathy was picking up too much lately. Schuldig hoped they wouldn't have to pull him out of the men's vomiting one of these days. "You have to control it, or it controls you," he said, one of the most repeated and most annoying mantras from the Schloss. 

Nagi gave him the finger. 

"Don't be a brat or you won't get your allowance."

"Where and when?" Farfarello asked simply, which probably saved Schuldig from violence. Farfarello was having a good day. There had been a lot of good days lately, even taking into account Nagi's occasional power surges. No wonder they were about to be attacked again.

"Later this morning," Crawford said. "We'll meet our contact, get paid, and they'll strike not long after that."

"They must be getting hard up if they need to rob us, too," Schuldig said.

"Or they think payment will make us complacent." Crawford pushed his glasses up his nose. "I don't see the attacks ending any time soon, either way. We have to stay vigilant."

Nagi shrugged. Farfarello wandered off to the room they were keeping their arsenal in. 

It was only when they were getting actively shot at that it caught up with Schuldig that Crawford, the _asshole,_ hadn't told them how _many_ snipers there would be.

"Fuck, Crawford," he said. "When is our fucking _backup_ coming?"

"We'll be fine," Crawford said, and Schuldig heard the lie in his voice. Fuck. Schuldig had been wrong; Crawford had seen the snipers, not the quantity. Getting to shop first hadn’t worked out as well as they’d planned, either. Schuldig had quite liked the leather trousers that were now a pile of vaguely organic detritus, indistinguishable from the bag the store clerk had put them in.

Schuldig had known all along that he could dodge Crawford's precognition; not consistently, and not without effort, but it had been something he'd worked on getting better at, a skill he could keep in his back pocket if everything went completely to shit.

 _Well. That much is true._ "Let's get married," he said.

Crawford was always easiest to surprise when he was distracted. _"What?"_

"You heard me," he said. "Married. Wedding. Big cake, dress, friends and--"

"We have two friends," Crawford said, and pulled him down into the dirt as a shot whizzed over their heads. "For a generous definition of 'friend.'"

"They can come," Schuldig said. Fuck. He'd come this far. Fucked if he was giving up. "You can go back to New York, we can--"

"I'm not from the city."

"I know, you're from Poughkeepsie or Podunk or Buttfuck--"

"Shut up." 

"We can go to Shut Up for the honeymoon, then."

Another shot rang out, but Schuldig had the sniper now. He grabbed his mind and dragged him over for Crawford to shoot. Schuldig felt the guy's mind blip out of existence and grinned. 

"We're not getting married. What the hell do you want to get married for?"

 _Play it light. Make it a joke, right?_ He aimed again, shot. Another would-be assassin dropped. "I just want my own special big day. If you'd let me bring gun journals to the hairdresser, maybe I wouldn't have read all those bridal magazines..." That was the last of the snipers, right at the windows where they belonged--

He stood and emptied both barrels. "That's all of them in that block. Don't you want to make an honest woman of me?"

Crawford was scanning the surrounding buildings. "....no," he said.

Schuldig had always known that would be the answer, but someone was trying to fucking kill them, _again,_ and he was at his limit. "Don't you want everything I have? My worldly goods?"

"I already know where you live. I can just take them." Ah, there was the Crawford smirk. So handsome. So punchable.

"This isn't as funny as you-- _Shit!" Another_ one. "New shooter!"

Crawford, that _bastard,_ was already behind a dumpster on the other side of the alley. Where the fuck were the cops? Normally when you made this much noise, the sirens would already be deafening. Maybe Eszett had paid them off. "Way ahead of you. On my mark: three, two, one, _now."_

Schuldig _moved._ "Where the fuck are the others?"

"We just have to stay alive a few more seconds." He reloaded. "You don't really want a pointless piece of paper, do you?"

He sure as fuck did. He settled down behind Crawford and checked his ammunition stash. There wasn't much left. _Crawford had better be right about 'a few more seconds.'_ "Yeah I do," he said. "I know we can't put our real names on it so don't bother saying that. I don't care." Like Schuldig even remembered what his name had been.

" _Why?_ "

"Jesus, Crawford, if you make me say it I'll shoot you myself."

Crawford was well-shielded to the end, but there was something softening there. Maybe not enough, but-- 

"Can't you just assume this is some telepath weirdness you need to indulge?" It was his final offer, really, and he already knew what the answer would be. Maybe he'd bring it up again five years from now, if they lived that long, and Crawford would treat it like an old joke.

Crawford put his hand on Schuldig's arm, and his lips moved, and the masonry above them exploded.

Schuldig's ears were still ringing when Farfarello walked over with the grenade launcher, as casual as if it was any Sunday stroll. He said something about Nagi buying comic books _._ Fucking typical. "...steak," Farfarello said, or maybe Schuldig just picked it up. Steak sounded good, either way.

"Me too," Crawford said as he shot one of the stragglers. At least one of them still had bullets left.

"They do really good steaks in New York," Schuldig said. He'd tried to make it sound matter-of-fact, but Nagi's expression indicated otherwise. Goddamn the kid. Wasn't being able to flip over cars with your mind enough power?

"We are _not_ going to New York." Crawford checked his gun and slipped it back into his shoulder holster. Farfarello was already taking the grenade launcher apart; Nagi was holding one of the shopping bags open for him to drop the parts back in. "We're based in Europe right now, and there are many closer places to get married. I suggest Spain; I can book cheap flights and it'd be convenient for a relaxing honeymoon. Our next job's there as well."

 _No cornflowers,_ Schuldig thought, and pushed Crawford against the wall to give him exactly what he deserved.

Nagi said some bullshit about how they always complained teenagers were the ones who couldn't hold back their emotions. Hormones? Whatever. Like Schuldig and Crawford didn't both know what had happened in England when they'd found Weiss.

Crawford wasn't wrong that getting married was stupid, and pointless, but maybe doing something pointless was what they needed. He'd grabbed both Schuldig's arms and was pulling him closer, so that was a good sign, wasn't it?

"You do it," Nagi told Farfarello.

Farfarello said something about a bridesmaid, and Schuldig caught up.

"I've always thought you'd be an adorable flower-girl, Nagi," Schuldig said, breaking the kiss, and it was funny right until the wall started shaking and he felt the pressure on the back of his spine. "Hey," and it came out more like a squeak than he'd wanted. "Don't kill us, and you can bring Omi." _Then we'll have three guests,_ he thought triumphantly at Crawford, who was straightening his glasses from when Schuldig had knocked them askew. He rolled his eyes at Schuldig, but he didn't seem angry about it.

"OK," Nagi said, and the dangerous rattling stopped. Schuldig's spine felt normal again. "Maybe."

Crawford's hand was still wrapped around his arm, tight, possessive.

_The cops are coming eventually, aren't they?_

_Not for a while,_ Crawford thought, and pulled him back in.


End file.
